Weeknotes 004

9 Mar, 2025

So yes, clearly I lapsed hard and lost that weeknotes feeling. But I’m back. Honest.

In my defence, VO Pads was all consuming. And everything else sort of fell by the wayside.

It was wonderful of course, being that focussed on a single thing. I haven’t been that into a project for quite some time.

And of course, the downside is that other activities receive less focus - sleep, eating properly, interviews. It wasn’t as bad as some other ocassions in my past. I have other, wonderful, things which keep me grounded.

And the fact that there was a definite stopping point helped a great deal.

This week some fixes to the playback were applied, and I made the interval slider background stripey.

The next chunk of work is likely to make the interval slider zoomable - it’s near useless when the video is long and the chosen interval is short.

This week I returned properly to the project codenamed Strix. What I really should have been working on.

It’s always strange to return to previous work. Re-learning the original thought processes. Looking at it from a new perspective.

I have decided to reduce the scope of the project a little. It’s still ambitious. But there is a definite core functionality now which will be good enough for v1.

Coming back to React Native after several care-free months of React Web has been hard. Entire mornings lost to a sudden Red Screen with non-obvious reasons. Feels brittle. I discovered that working with XML is not something RN cares for.

Going forward, I am determined to always have a current working build on my phone. I want to move to testflight quickly so that others can get it in there hands.

Some time this week was spent re-examining which state manager to use.

Xstate/Store mostly worked out fine in the last project, but i ran up against some limitations in being able to call other actions/events from within events.

So I decided to try something else. The project started with Zustand, but I have found it gets kind of messy organisationally.

I started with Legend/state. A bit more of signals/observable based approach.

Two things didn’t work so well for me: the first is that I ran into a situation where an observable wouldn’t update as expected. This may have been because I was calling it from an interval timer. But I had to use an awkward work-around.

Next, is that it seems to come batteries included with sqlite persistence that appears to conflict with op-sqlite.

So, fickle creature that I am, I decided to go with Jotai instead.

Similar concepts to Legend, so I still have a hill to climb to get used to the composition of individual state.

  • One of the more serious casulaties of my recent work sprint was losing momentum on my Person Of Interest watch-through.

  • White Lotus already seems better than the previous entries.

  • Prime Target ended this week. Enjoyable Dan Brown-ish adventure.

  • Severance is not something I am super enthusiastic about, but it’s clearly top tier viewing.

  • Did I mention that I finally watched Wild Robot? Didn’t have much expectations, but it was wonderful. The opening half an hour is free of talking, much like Wall-E which I loved.

Max Cooper - On Being

Needs more listens, but have been enjoying this a lot this week.

Trip Simulator

Simulating walking routes in the iOS simulator is not great DX. This tool makes it slightly easier.

Tempted to fork it to allow drag/drop of a GPX file.

Screen Now

A (so far) free alternative to Screen Capture. Not quite as full featured, but has some nice things missing from SC like adding captions.

Senior TV producers take shelf-stacking jobs as UK industry remains in crisis

As someone who is currently experiencing a longer than expected paid work shortage, this hit hard.